Here’s 10 things I learned from this week’s Digital TV in CEE conference and OTT pre-conference in Budapest.
The first was that RTL sees the actions currently being taken against it by the Hungarian government in a wider, more European context.
Andreas Rudas, a senior executive at the company with strong links to the country – he revealed that he was born in Budapest – was of the view that many politicians in other European countries would like to act in a similar way towards broadcasters. It was therefore important for the European authorities to act now to ensure this does not happen.
The second thing was that Telekom Austria, represented at the Digital TV in CEE conference by Stefan Amon, was in talks with a number of parties in the region about its white label solution and hoped to announce one or two new customers in the next few weeks.
The third thing I learned was that Slovak Telekom plans to launch an OTT service in the near future, most probably later this year.
It has to be said that the telco has very much taken the fight to the market leader Skylink in recent months, with one of its biggest statements of intent being last year’s acquisition of Digi Slovakia, which came together with 200,000 DTH and almost 40,000 cable subscribers.
The fourth was that when introducing new products companies have to be acutely aware of the huge cultural differences that exist between some markets. Take the case of CI+, for instance, which Jim Helfgott from UPC DTH said was regarded differently in the Czech Republic and Slovakia than in Hungary.
The fifth, courtesy of Ovum, was that despite being one of the fastest growing OTT markets globally, the CEE region currently accounts for only 1% of OTT revenues. However, the figure is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.
The sixth was that Russia is a hive of activity in the OTT space. That so may be, with companies such as Play and ivi.ru certainly making a huge impact, but there was not enough attention given to other markets in the region.
Indeed, it could be argued that Russia’s TV industry is a ‘special case’, untypical of the rest of CEE due to a number of factors.
The seventh was that despite the mantra that they are increasingly focused on the needs of their customers, when it comes down to it providers of pay-TV services all have their limits.
I was particularly struck by the negativity shown by UPC Romania to the idea of offering channels on an a la carte basis. It’s not as though the concept hasn’t been tried out before and proved to work.
The eighth was that the Ukrainian OTT platform Divan.tv is making waves internationally. It will become the first service to offer Russian language channels via Google’s Chromecast next month, which in itself is a major development.
The ninth was that Russia’s OTT service Play, which is very much focused on smart TV, would soon start streaming in 4K. Its CEO Leonid Belyaev also expressed doubts about the prospects for Chromecast.
The tenth thing I learned was that games consoles have so far not really been used to access OTT services in CEE. However, at least two speakers were of the view that this could change in the future.
All in all, much food for thought from an event that despite being on the long side had a number of interesting speakers.
